Development of limiting decay heat values

A number of tools are used in the assessment of decay heat during an outage of the CANDU-6. Currently, the technical basis for all of these tools is 'CANDU Channel Decay Power', Reference 1. The methods used in that document were limited to channel decay powers. However, for most outage support analysis, decay heat limits are based on bundle heats. Since the production of that document in 1977, new versions of codes, and updates of general-purpose and CANDU-specific libraries have become available. These tools and libraries have both a more formal technical basis than Reference 1, and also a more formal validation base. Using these tools it is now possible to derive decay heat with more specific input parameters, such as fuel composition, heat per unit of fuel, and irradiation history, and to assign systematically derived uncertainty allowances to such decay heat values. In particular, we sought to examine a broad range of likely bundle histories, and thus establish a set of limiting bundle decay beat values, that could serve as a bounding envelope for use in Nuclear Safety Analysis. (author)